Comment by zer01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer01 | Hacker News Reader

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Right, so what's happening right now is much more akin to the early days of the internet than anything else IMO. In the same ways we couldn't have ever predicted Facebook, Google, iPhones, etc, in the 90s it's hard to say exactly what impact crypto/web3 will have on the modern world.

There's actually something truly new and tangible that crypto has spurred - the ability to drive consensus in a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever. With those new tools in the global toolbox I suspect that some iteration of them will be in use somewhere in our future, but no-one exactly where. Are NFT game assets the ultimate expression of crypto? No, but Friendster and HotOrNot weren't the ultimate expression of the internet either.

The ability to network 2 computers together was also new and tangible thing that the internet as a concept brought, but it wasn't before a huge amount of foundational work in the form of IETF protocols, router hardware design & production, software network stacks, and wireless communications before it really took off. Mass adoption was one of the last phases, and I still remember a day when people would call you crazy for putting your credit card anywhere near the internet.

IMO that's the phase we're at, so for most people it's just not ready yet, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there trying new and novel things with these tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever.

Let's try to think quite ahead, going sci-fi even:

Maybe the only use case for such programs is valid if they are powerful AIs, or uploaded human minds. But for the blockchain to be able to run that? The compute and memory needed is astronomical. It also means that blockchain will be relevant technology only in the 22nd century and now we are just playing with it for no actual value whatsoever.

Because, how else would I ensure that my uploaded mind from year 2060 henceforth runs forever in the cloud? I can't, the 22nd century equivalent AWS may be shutdown. Solution - blockchain...

Right now smart contracts are very crappy computer programs, but people are still building amazing things with them (like DAOs or decentralized exchanges). It’s hard to say what people will be building 20 years from now or what they’ll look like in the same way that the idea of end to end encrypted video calls through Signal was not even something people could dream up in a practical sense without the groundwork invention/innovation of things like public key cryptography, and a minimal level of ubiquitous computing power in the form of cell phones to make it usable and practical.

Quantum computing is going through this too right now where we have the ability to compute with a handful of qbits, but the implications on a years time horizon are profound.

You do bring up a valid point in that it’s unclear exactly how the “legacy software” story fits in here. Migrations to new blockchains and the blockchains themselves upgrading without contention (Tezos comes to mind with this as a core feature) seem like the natural response to this problem. Not unlike anything else though it’ll be hard to predict until it slaps us in the face lol.

It is of course possible that web3 is a world-changing idea and most people are unable to envision the amazing and revolutionary impact it will have in the future. But criticism doesn't mean anything on its own. Those examples you listed — iPhone, Google, Facebook, etc — there were countless failures for each of those successes. You're relying on survivorship bias. Just because a new technology faces initial criticism, that doesn't mean it's guaranteed to succeed because some successful products also faced initial criticism.

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